Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

Without nicotine, his brain seemed murky with circling, unfocused dread, and the world itself appeared somehow more unfriendly—emanating, he couldn’t help but think, a soft glow of ill will.

“We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves,” he’d say. Sometimes he would make a gesture that was almost like a touch, though he actually rarely made skin-to-skin contact. “But we can control those stories,” he’d say. “I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them.”

There’s this spiral where you can’t stop feeling horrible about your horrible self, and it makes you act more horrible.

“Are you sure that you’re not trying to impose a pattern on these deaths that isn’t there?” I said. “Think of the constellations. We look up at the sky and think we see a flat surface with these bright dots called stars that we can connect. We put that cluster together and say it looks like a dipper, or a bear. We put another together, and it seems to be in the shape of a fish, or a scorpion. We forget to imagine the stars in three dimensions. They aren’t clustered together—they’re light-years, billions of miles apart. They only seem like they could line up from our one, limited perspective, here on the planet earth.” I looked at him earnestly. “We think about our own problems that way, too,” I said. “We look at them in one dimension, and it seems that they are all connected. We think that there’s some image we can make out if we connect the dots. But more than likely the dots are not connected. They’re on separate geometric planes, light-years apart.”

Retrospective patterning is the fallacy of seeing planning where there is none. A design that doesn’t exist.

There is a difference between stopping and concluding. Rain stops falling. A song concludes. Only one is deliberate.

The future is fixed The past ever-changing— —LYNDA BARRY

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. —C. G. JUNG, Psychology and Religion: West and East

He was silent, and his silence was like a frown traveling through satellites.

When you’ve been abused in the way you were, you have a virus. And the virus will demand that you pass it on to someone else. You don’t even have that much of a choice.”

In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation. —SACHEVERELL SITWELL, For Want of the Golden City

The Non-Existent and Existent are identical in all but name. This identity of apparent opposites I call the profound, the great deep, the open door of bewilderment.